We Are All One

A chess board is a place where strategies come into play. Each move that a player makes affects the move that his opponent will take, as well as affecting all of the other pieces on the chessboard. These moves will affect the next set of available moves, and so on.

Life can be compared to a game of chess and I suppose that there are probably a lot of people out there that have made the same comparison. In fact, someone wrote a book on it. Who knew? Anyway, I was doing some thinking the other day and came to the conclusion that chess and life have a lot of similarities.

Every choice we make in life will affect our choices in the future. It will affect the people that are involved in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Some of these effects will be good, and some of them will be not good. All of these choices that are made - from the little things like hitting the snooze button to what shoes to wear to the big stuff like getting married - have effects that ripple outward from the time the choice is made to affect an infinite number of things which in turn affect other people and other things. It goes on and on. It's comparable to the Butterfly Effect where the tiny wings of a butterfly perhaps making minute changes in the atmosphere that can cause a tornado to form somewhere else in the world.

The cause and effect of everything that we do is what shapes the universe that we live in. Just as our thoughts and feelings help to bring forth new things for us, our actions also affect everything in the world around us. Who knows? What if sneezing in the right direction can set off a hurricane in the Pacific? These with so many variables for everything, just about anything is possible.

We have been given an all -knowing guidance systems that will always lead us in the right direction. What we call a soul, or higher self, or spirit is always with us. It is connected to the source of energy that all things are connected to. In this way, we are all one. This is why it is so important for us to know the difference between the inner voice that is our ego talking, just a refection of our minds and our higher self, which is a much softer voice. Some people can call it intuition, or a gut feeling. This is when our higher selves are trying to guide us to make the right decisions. It could be because we are on a crossroads of choices and a wrong move could set off catastrophes either in our own lives or in the lives of others, or it could be because one choice will lead us easily to the things that we desire and the other will lead us further away. In any case, whenever stuck at a crossroads where there are numerous choices before you, pause to check your intuition. What choice feels right?